Madame Justice Louise Arbour didn't last long on the Supreme Court of Canada.

Five years on the highest court, and still only 57, her career has been spectacular - and it's still on the rise.

Her days of relative anonymity on the Supreme Court are likely over now that she's agreed to be the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, based in Geneva.

The job became open last August when the UN headquarters in Baghdad was bombed and High Commissioner Vieira de Mello and 21 others died.

Reaction to Arbour's appointment is mostly positive - she was hand-chosen by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan - although some are more uneasy.

Arbour first vaulted into public attention as the chief UN prosecutor seeking war criminals in the Balkans and later Rwanda. At the conclusion of the U.S./NATO 78-day air war against the Serbs, she indicted former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo.

The one instrumental in making Arbour the UN prosecutor was then- U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who was the key advocate for war in Kosovo on behalf of Albanians.

During Kosovo, Arbour was repeatedly quoted describing atrocities, massacres, mass graves and 740,000 Albanian Kosovars displaced by Serbs.

She sent teams of investigators and forensic specialists into Kosovo to find evidence. Arbour and her deputy Graham Blewitt defined seven specific sites where massacres had occurred and mass graves existed.

In her 42-page indictiment of Milosovec, Arbour said she was reluctant to make these sites "public" because if "you identify your centres of interest," those guilty may remove bodies and hide evidence.

One of the leading "massacres" for which Milosevic was indicted, was the murder of 45 civilians at the Albanian village of Racak.

David Johnson, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) publicly expressed "outrage and shock engendered by the massacre." He fully supported the massacre claims of OSCE Mission Director William Walker, who investigated.

Ambassador Johnson urged immediate action by prosecutor Arbour, who responded: "This horror confirms that my decision to indict Slobodan Milosevic was right."

The only trouble with the Racak massacre, as it turned out, is that it never happened. It was a fraud, a hoax, a disinformation ploy orchestrated by Albanian Kosovars.

Racak had been a genuine fight between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). After the battle, Albanians gathered their dead and dumped the bodies in a ditch, and claimed they were civilians massacred by Serbs.

Friendly journalists co-operated. Then- U.S. president Bill Clinton even bemoaned the outrage, which he said justified the war.

Subsequently, journalists from France and Germany, and forensic experts from Finland, visited the scene and determined the bodies weren't murdered, but had been killed in fighting. They tried to correct the record, to little avail.

I've seen no evidence Louise Arbour ever issued a correction or acknowledged error in the accusation of massacres.

Filmmaker Garth Pritchard was in Kosovo documenting the Canadian forensic team (which found bodies, but no mass graves and no torture). He recalls Arbour's visit to his area, where he says she largely ignored the team. Pritchard also wonders why Arbour and the tribunal showed scant interest in investigating atrocities and ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia, where the Princess Pats won commendation for resisting the Croat attack.

To this day, five years after the "war," not one mass grave has been found in Kosovo. The 2,000 people killed that Arbour mentioned when the war started, were roughly half Serb, half Albanian.

By necessity, the war crimes case against Milosevic has switched to Bosnia, where some 30 mass graves have been found - especially at Srebrenica, where UN troops (who replaced Canadians) passively let Serbs massacre Muslims.

In Kosovo, mass graves are as elusive as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If we went to war for human rights in Kosovo, why not in Iraq, where over 300 mass graves of Saddam's victims have been found - maybe 400,000 victims?

Human rights and the UN are uneasy companions - more rhetoric than reality, judging from member states. Louise Arbour should feel at home.